plague

uhhhhhhhhhhh, how you doing, NPR? You wanna talk about anything? You need a hug, maybe?

these kids today

American Horror Story: Hotel worries about these kids today, with their Instagram and their entitlement and their Oedipal fixations, when it should really be worrying about the adults’ misguided efforts, and also American Horror Story: Hotel just wishes you would just call if you’re going to be out late, that’s all, it doesn’t seem like a lot to ask, but AHS: Hotel doesn’t like to make a fuss so if you can’t be considerate it will just sit over here and not complain, not even a peep.

check it out

Once again, I’m covering American Horror Story for The A.V. Club. You can check out my review of “Checking In,” AHS: Hotel‘s premiere, here.

True Detective S2: a ghost story without a ghost

“A full moon is the right time to ratify alliances.” (HBO)

This week, I sat in on The A.V. Club’s True Detective review. My analysis: True Detective is a ghost story without a ghost, and with a heart of lurid pulp.

vortex

Soooo, we’re just straight-up living in Night Vale, right?

spam or spectre

At first blush, it seems like a standard phishing attempt, but tagged onto the end is a hint of something gruesome.

Is this simple spam or one o’ them curse-from-beyond dealies?

I guess we’ll see five days from today, at 12:42 a.m. Or my survivors will.

kill is kiss

A year ago on The Toast, I discussed Pontypool, Picnic at Hanging Rock, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind:

St. Valentine’s Day is an excuse to express our most intense or obscure passions. But words can be a frail tool to capture the complications and complexities of this thing we call love: the sweet blush of infatuation, the kinship and kindness of true companions, the frenzy of unfettered lust, the torments of jealousy, betrayal, or heartbreak. So perhaps it’s no coincidence that three films set on Valentine’s Day hinge on the fragility and feebleness of words, creating worlds where meaning and reason fall apart.

Stars Hollow

[MASSIVE SPOILERS AHEAD OH BOY PRETTY MASSIVE] Here’s the dark secret in Gilmore Girls that no one ever talks about: Stars Hollow lies in the grip of a shadowy fertility cabal that rules the lives of its denizens — and even their folk elsewhere — with terrible certainty.

Think about it: Christopher Hayden accidentally impregnated Lorelai, then a generation later he accidentally impregnates his new partner. Luke has a daughter with his high school girlfriend. Luke’s sister Liz has two unplanned pregnancies ~18 years apart. Lane gets pregnant with twins the very first time she has sex. Sookie is so overwhelmed by pregnancy and parenthood that she and Jackson decide he should have a vasectomy to avoid any further disruption to their lives, but something persuades him not only to skip the agreed-upon procedure but to keep his continued fertility secret from his wife so she can be surprised by yet another OOPS pregnancy.

The only reasonable conclusion: Gilmore Girls takes place in a dystopian alternative universe where all social and sexual mores are controlled by forces beyond the control of the individual, outside the scope of sex-ed classes, and unfettered from the many forms of reliable and widely available birth control. In the AU of Gilmore Girls, all heterosexual couplings serve the larger master of society’s need for babies, babies, more babies, always more babies. You have plans? Too bad. Stars Hollow needs babies. You have hopes and dreams? I hope and dream that they’re about babies, because that’s what you’ll be having.

Make Gilmore Girls a double-feature with The Handmaid’s Tale! Also, I am pretty worried about April Nardini.

[cross-posted to The VideoReport]

in the night… in the dark…

An evil old house, the kind some people call ‘haunted,’ is like an undiscovered country waiting to be explored.

Robert Wise’s 1963 The Haunting (adapted from Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House) is a masterpiece of measured suspense, a truly haunting portrait of repression and anxiety mounting from dread to outright terror. It’s also the bittersweet tale of a young woman struggling to overcome a lifetime of isolation and alienation, determined to see a slice of the world and find adventure, love, and somewhere she belongs.

On Saturday, October 25th, starting at 8:00 p.m. EDT, I’m hosting a live-tweet of “The Haunting” (1963) at @emilyorelse for The Toast. Join in on #ToastieTwitter and #TheHaunting!

Then during Halloween week, visit The Toast for my analysis of late-bloomers, love, and friendship The Haunting and Lucky McKee’s 2002 May, a genre-straddling horror-romance story of a lonely woman seeking company and comfort. (And join the May live-tweet on Monday, October 27th!)

The Haunting will play on Turner Classic Movies at 8:00 Eastern on Saturday, October 25th. You can check out the Facebook event for live-tweet, where I’ve posted plenty streaming options, or look for The Haunting in independent video stores everywhere. We’ll be live-tweeting the 1963 original, not the 1999 remake.

the mother of all fears

“Movies about mothers – mothers’ relationship with their children, children’s relationship with their mothers – can trade in easy sentiment or melodrama. But motherhood isn’t all swaddling and coddling and comfortable archetypes. In the rough terrain where a woman becomes a mother, she can feel she’s been corralled, her personality, her persona, her entire independent self suddenly defined largely by her actual or idealized connection to a child. These three thrillers tap into the poignancy and pressures that many mothers face, digging into the complicated web of social expectations in a world that both mythologizes and devalues motherhood, while translating the everyday tensions of caregiving into the language of the fantastic and the grotesque.”

Today at The Toast, my essay about motherhood as depicted in Bunny Lake Is Missing, The Others, and El Orfanato.